Building Sustainable Brands: The Brand Management Process Gelb
Consulting Group, Inc. 1011 Highway 6 South Suite 120 Houston,
Texas 77077 P + 281.759.3600 F + 281.759.3607
www.gelbconsulting.com An Endeavor Management Company
Building Sustainable Brands: The Brand Management Process
Introduction Your organizations brand represents a promise to
employees, consumers and other stakeholders. More than just a logo
or advertisement, your brand has the unique ability to unite all
aspects of your organization and meaningfully differentiate you
from competitors. Although perceptions of your brand are created in
the marketplace, they can be effectively managed to drive growth by
remaining true to the organizations capabilities, core values and
heritage. Gelb has a long history of working with healthcare
organizations to create brand strategies that look beyond an annual
initiative and demonstrate long-term effectiveness. Below we have
outlined our brand process, which is organized into four stages:
understand, create, deploy and monitor. Understand Your foundation
for success begins with an understanding of the objectives, how
success will be measured, and who will make decisions. Lack of
commitment from leadership is a common reason that healthcare brand
strategies fail, so obtaining executive buy-in is also a crucial
first step. You can learn more about how to begin the branding
process with a solid foundation by reading our article,
Constructing a Better Brand. During this stage, a brand team should
be developed. A brand team is a group that will play a critical
role throughout the process reviewing research findings, evaluating
options, and ultimately making recommendations for change. Your
brand team should engage crossfunctional stakeholders throughout
the organization. For example, if your brand includes multiple
hospitals or centers, it is ideal to have at least one
representative from each of them on the brand team. Members of the
brand team begin to feel a sense of ownership in the process if
they are engaged from the beginning planning process. This sense of
ownership facilitates their advocacy throughout the process and in
the period of brand change. Your brand team should then define
success criteria. When developing these criteria, keep in mind why
the project was initiated and how it is expected to support the
organizations business goals. To simulate discussion, you can
discuss what each member of the brand team wants to get out of the
project, what success looks like, and how results will be measured.
Establishing success criteria is an important step, as they will be
used to guide you brand teams decisions throughout the process.
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Building Sustainable Brands: The Brand Management Process
Before making any decisions or changes, a brand audit will give you
a thorough understanding of your brands current positioning. A
brand audit involves delving into your current research and
communications, as well as identifying gaps and conducting new
research. Most likely, you already have research to give you
insight on issues such as patient satisfaction, physician loyalty,
and consumer preference. Analyzing this research will help you
understand how your brands goals compare with current performance
and positioning. At Gelb, we use our Brand Trust Model to organize
these insights into key categories that establish how the brand
creates value, differentiates itself from competitors, and delivers
an exceptional experience. Below are examples of research that you
can evaluate to provide insight about each of these areas. 1.
Customer Value: Examines the criteria healthcare consumers use to
choose among local hospitals an importance of each criterion. Also
investigates drivers of overall preference. For example, consumers
could be asked their level of agreement that you offer the latest
medical technology, have a wide range of medical services, provide
the best patient care, or have the best nurses. 2. Consistent
Experience: Targets those who have used services at your hospital
and examines overall satisfaction in areas such as communication
with nurses or doctors, or responsiveness of hospital staff. 3.
Competitive Difference: Evaluates the strength of associations
consumers make with your brand and competing hospital brands, with
questions focused on consumer awareness/preference, advertising
recall, and current market share. 4. Familiarity: Measures overall
awareness and knowledge, such as how many people have heard of or
previously used your organization. After reviewing and organizing
your available research, it is likely that you will need to conduct
additional marketing research (quantitative and qualitative). These
efforts will help you fill information gaps needed to best create
your brand strategy. It is risky to create a healthcare brand
strategy without gathering data to show what motivates your
stakeholders and drives their loyalty. It is also vital to develop
an understanding of critical success factors for gaining buy-in
from your internal audience. The following tables outline examples
of research that can be crucial to understanding your current brand
positioning and developing prescriptions for growth. 3
Building Sustainable Brands: The Brand Management Process
Audience Community Leaders & Donors (Qualitative interviews or
focus groups) Referring Physicians (Qualitative interviews)
Consumers (Focus groups or online survey of primary and secondary
service areas) Audience System and Program Leadership (Qualitative
interviews) Employees (Focus groups or online survey) External
Brand Audit Purpose Review their experience with your organization
and competitors, evaluate marketing effectiveness, opportunities
for improvement, and prescriptions for growth Determine
satisfaction with current referral process, perception of your
organization and competitors, opinions regarding current brand
strategy, and recommendations for change Examine current
preferences, attitudes, satisfaction and ways to improve
familiarity, customer value, experience and competitive difference
Internal Brand Audit Purpose Review consumer research; determine
critical success factors and criteria for gaining buy-in Understand
gaps between consumer research and employee perceptions; determine
alignment with the organizations goals and willingness to adapt to
organizational change Also included in this phase should be a
messaging review of your publicly-available marketing and
communication materials. Examples of materials to review include
advertising (print, online, TV, radio), social media, websites and
patient education materials. If your brand has multiple names,
logos or symbols, these materials should be organized and reviewed.
The goal of reviewing these materials is to create an inventory of
how the brand promise is expressed. By creating this inventory and
understanding how your healthcare brand is being expressed, you can
identify key messages and visual vocabulary, as well as identify
any gaps in consistency, tone, keywords, etc. Create During this
stage, information that you have learned from your brand audit and
messaging review should be synthesized into a presentation that
will serve as a basis for a discussion with the brand team. Your
brand team should be brought together in a brand scenario workshop
devoted to analyzing the research and brainstorming new ideas. It
is important to maintain a collaborative environment in which the
team has freedom to suggest ideas, ask questions and develop
agreement around decisions. A collaborative approach enables the
team to take ownership of decisions and ultimately act as champions
for the brand. 4
Building Sustainable Brands: The Brand Management Process Below
are discussion topics for the workshop: Research Review o What were
the key takeaways from the research? o How is the brand perceived
today? o What are the opportunities for the brand? o In what areas
have we been the most successful? Business Strategy o What guidance
is provided by your business strategy? o How do your
visions/mission/values align with your strategic priorities? o How
do we reflect the brand through interactions with our customers and
stakeholders? Possibilities o Who are we today? (current strengths,
weaknesses, perceptions) o What should we be in the future? o How
will we measure success? Using insights and ideas from these
discussions, brand scenarios can be created after the workshop is
completed. Each scenario should include visual metaphors, a value
proposition and positioning statement, service standards, the brand
promise, and key messages. After the scenarios have been completed,
the brand team comes together again for brand scenario evaluation.
To provide a framework for the discussions, the scenarios should be
evaluated based on the success criteria that your brand team
outlined at the beginning stage of this process. Below is an
example of a spreadsheet for scenario evaluation. Criteria Low
Performance Moderate Performance High Performance Supports mission
Believable Memorable Focus on customer needs Focus on business
benefits Consistent messages Consistent images Recognizes current
perceptions Once a brand has been chosen, documents can be created
to guide decisions regarding the brand and to communicate brand
standards. The following paragraphs and images describe these
guiding documents. 5
Building Sustainable Brands: The Brand Management Process Brand
Architecture: This will guide decisions regarding entities of the
organization that could benefit from the brand. This is
particularly important if your organization has multiple facilities
or partnerships, as it establishes the differences among current
brands. This image (right) outlines the structure of a Brand
Architecture. Message Map: This will guide future communications
from the master brand and any affiliated brands. Based on
collective thinking from the brand team, you will outline how the
brand is perceived today, how you want it to be perceive in the
future, and how you will convince them. This includes attitudes to
overcome, attitudes to reinforce, differentiating messages, reasons
to believe and how to leave a lasting impression. The image to the
right outlines the contents of a Message Map. The Brand Book: This
document provides guidance for marketing communication and
executives. It is used as a guide to stakeholders in developing
external and internal communications. Included should be your brand
definition, reasons for change, how decisions were made, current
perceptions, value proposition, positioning statement, service
standards, brand promise, expectation of staff, and success
measures. It should also be used as an opportunity to empower your
stakeholders to become brand advocates who understand their role in
bringing the brand to life and buy into the strategy. 6
Building Sustainable Brands: The Brand Management Process
Deploy Near the completion of the previous stage, a detailed
timeline should be created for deploying the new brand strategy to
employees and consumers. This is an important opportunity to
communicate about your brand to your target audiences. Deployment
will typically last between three and six months, depending on your
needs, and includes: - Strategic and tactical planning Defining
success criteria and establishing benchmarks Developing training
materials, web site content or sales collateral Determining the
ideal customer experience (you can do this by using a qualitative
research process called Experience Mapping, which engages consumers
in in-depth interviews to understand their current and ideal
experiences. You can learn more about Experience Mapping by reading
our article, Experience Mapping Growing by Understanding) An
important part of deployment is an internal launch that promotes
understanding of the brand and how employees should enact the brand
in their everyday behaviors. When employees feel included in the
process and responsible for participating, they are more likely to
buy into the changes. Sustaining long-term momentum will require
routine communication that supports the brand and a commitment from
management to make decisions with the brand in mind. Therefore, be
careful to avoid the all-too-common mistake of thinking
brandrelated communication is minimally important after this stage
has been completed. Below is a list of resources for deploying the
brand to employees and customers. Employees Brand book CEO letter
Launch video Business cards/stationery Intranet
Proposal/folders/collateral On-site brand visits PowerPoint
template Worksite posters Building signage Customers
Questions/answers document Video CEO letter Brochure Tradeshow
exhibits Print advertising Website Monitor Transforming branding
initiatives to long-term cultural changes requires holding your
organization accountable for results. Regular communication about
the brand and setting expectations about how the brand will be
protected through everyday decisions and service standards is of
upmost importance. Some organizations create brand experience
training programs that all new and current employees must complete.
Experience training workshops 7
Building Sustainable Brands: The Brand Management Process
should include personal action plans in which employees develop
specific goals for enacting the brand promise. Management then uses
these personal action plans during employee evaluations. Or, action
plans can be developed as a team and regularly referred to in team
meetings. In this way, the promise of the brand is regularly talked
about and monitored internally (for more information about this,
read our white paper Developing a Customer Focused Culture with
Experience Mapping Workshops). A particularly effective way to
quantitatively monitor the brand is through online dashboards. They
allow you to monitor employee alignment, customer satisfaction and
touchpoint performance. Dashboard systems are hosted online, so
they can be accessed anywhere, anytime. Most importantly,
situations that may place the organizations relationships atrisk
are escalated for service recovery. Below are activities that can
be measured through a dashboard. 1. Customer Experience Dashboard:
Continuously monitors the customer experience and escalates at-risk
issues via email. Our experience dashboard efficiently distributes
information in real time for internal benchmarking and online
reporting. 2. Touchpoint Performance Dashboard: Our touchpoint
performance dashboard using standard measures to test each new and
existing touchpoint. This dashboard distributes information in real
time to identify best practices and cost-effectively test new
advertising (including TV and radio) before launch. 3.
Organizational Excellence Dashboard: Monitors employee commitment
to the organization, prevailing attitudes and alignment with
corporate goals. This tool is also used to monitor satisfaction
with support functions within your enterprise. You can learn more
about dashboards by reading our article, Action Marketing: Patient
Experience Dashboards. 8
Building Sustainable Brands: The Brand Management Process About
Endeavor Endeavor Management, is an international management
consulting firm that collaboratively works with their clients to
achieve greater value from their transformational business
initiatives. Endeavor serves as a catalyst by providing pragmatic
methodologies and industry expertise in Transformational
Strategies, Operational Excellence, Organizational Effectiveness,
and Transformational Leadership. Our clients include those
responsible for: Business Strategy Marketing and Brand Strategy
Operations Technology Deployment Strategic Human Capital Corporate
Finance The firms 40 year heritage has produced a substantial
portfolio of proven methodologies, deep operational insight and
broad industry experience. This experience enables our team to
quickly understand the dynamics of client companies and markets.
Endeavors clients span the globe and are typically leaders in their
industry. Gelb Consulting Group, a wholly owned subsidiary,
monitors organizational performance and designs winning marketing
strategies. Gelb helps organizations focus their marketing
initiatives by fully understanding customer needs through proven
strategic frameworks to guide marketing strategies, build trusted
brands, deliver exceptional experiences and launch new products.
Our websites: www.endeavormgmt.com www.gelbconsulting.com
www.gulfresearch.com 9